How the Spindel saves you time and money on laundry day

I have this love/hate relationship with doing laundry. Isn’t it great to conquer that dirty laundry pile and pack away freshly cleaned and folded laundry? Everything is so neat for a whole 10 minutes. But why must children make endless piles of laundry? It’s never ending. First they make mountains of dirty laundry. Then somehow, their clean clothes also get thrown around the place for God knows what reason and then you don’t even know what is clean and what is dirty and oh my God just make it stop!

All this means that there is always a lot of damn laundry to do, limited washing line space (shout out to living in a complex) and an ever-dwindling supply of pegs (do my children eat these things?! I have no idea how they go missing!). So I can never get all the laundry done on one day. It just takes ten thousand years to dry anything.

I could use the Air Turbo function on my washing machine but that’s a whole extra 25 minutes on my wash cycle.

Enter the Spindel. Now this unassuming little contraption is a lot more powerful than it looks. And while it says it’s a dryer, that’s a bit of a misnomer because the Spindle doesn’t actually dry your wet laundry the way a tumble dryer would.

What is does is spin the heck out of your wet laundry so that it takes a fraction of the time to dry on the line or a clothes horse. I was surprised at the amount of excess water that came out of my laundry that had gone through several spin cycles in the washing machine. All in, get this 3 minutes! Drie minute mense!!

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My first impression when I opened it was that it was rather small and that I could only fit about two towels in it. But it’s 6.5kg capacity meant that I could fit a whole lot more in that I expected.

But it’s so small?

It’s a simple mechanism. Put your wet laundry in, close the lid, turn the lever to spin, wait three minutes and then turn the lever to stop – it’s not automatically timed. And tada, take your laundry is a whole lot dryer than it was three minutes ago. My laundry dried in half an hour. Which means I was able to do a whole lot more laundry that day.

What’s to love?

But aside from saving me time, there are a few other reasons why I’m a fan of this hard working contraption.

It’s compact. Our flat is not the biggest and with two kids it means we have a lot of stuff. And lot of stuff means that we don’t have space to add new appliances. But the Spindel takes up so little space and we can store it out of the way easily.

It uses little electricity. The Spindel dries using spin power rather than heat power like a tumble dryer. So it uses a fraction of electricity. To put it into perspective, you can run over 65 cycles in the Spindel with just one unit of electricity (i.e. 1 kWh), whereas one tumble dryer cycle alone can consume over 3 units of electricity.

It saves water. With Cape Town coming out of one of the worst droughts we’ve had in a long time, we’ve all become a lot more water conscious. So when the Spindel gives me some more grey water for flushing the toilet or watering the few plants we have left, I’m all the more grateful for it.

It can be used on ALL fabrics. Yes, even your silky negligees (haha, I’m joking – who even wears those?). But if you had any they would not be ruined by the Spindel. But on a more practical note, it’s even safe for your stash of precious cloth nappies if you’re using them. The PUL that is used in a lot of cloth nappies won’t be in danger of the heat that you get with a tumble dryer. And who doesn’t love cloth nappies to dry quicker. This is ESPECIALLY useful in the winter months when you usually have cloth nappies hanging all over the place for days hoping to dry before that stash runs out.

What could be improved?

There’s not much that I can fault the Spindel with. I don’t think that it should be marketed as a dryer because I was very confused as to what it actually did when I was trying to decide whether to get this or a tumble dryer. I think you have to decide what would suit your lifestyle and needs better.

I also would’ve liked the whole thing to be automated so that I didn’t have to set a timer for 3 minutes every time I used it and for it to stop automatically. I suppose you could just stop it of you had to see to some kind of kid related emergency (usually a mess of some kind in my experience) and then restart the cycle again.

But for me those are not deal breakers and I’m quite happy to have something that lessens my time doing the laundry.

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